


Breathe

by Hornswaggler



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, at least up to 2x08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 09:12:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7838998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hornswaggler/pseuds/Hornswaggler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>D'avin would certainly prefer to avoid another eyeball incident, and even with the relative success in the caves, he's not exactly confident about his abilities.<br/>Lucky he happens to know a guy who knows an awful lot about meditation.</p><p>Between 2x08 and 2x09</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> There was too much of this ridiculous ship in the last episode to resist. Way too much. Not sorry at all.

It had been a really long time since he had even tried for this kind of focus.

D’avin hadn’t been lying -- he _had_ been a sniper -- but it wasn’t his speciality. He had been pulled to get the training, sure, and he knew his way around a rifle, but he was infantry primarily. He had been on the front lines, a foot soldier, and that required constant thought; it was tactics, analyzing enemy movements, and making split second decisions. That was what he was good at.

He had been a sniper. Just not a great one.

But hells, Alvis did have a point. Controlling the plasma by itself was one thing; controlling it when it was in someone’s veins was another thing entirely, and exploding the eyes of every Six they came across didn’t seem like a very efficient way of going about things. Not if they ever wanted answers.

He had to get that focus back. And that meant he had to...meditate or something.

He just wasn’t very good at that either.

It didn’t help that they were on a fast track back to Westerly because Johnny had gone silent. Lucy shouldn’t be so quiet, but with John gone and Dutch at the control panels trying to find a way to track him down, the ship felt empty.

Not that it was. There were the usual number of people, actually. It was just sometimes easy to forget.

D’avin heard the door open. He ignored it at first; Dutch would just call him up if she found anything, and it wasn’t like Lucy needed to open his door to tell him something. That left one other option, and it wasn’t one he ever knew how to deal with.

After a few seconds of silence, D’avin cracked one eye open. Alvis was leaning on the doorframe, arms folded across his chest, apparently prepared to wait for some kind of acknowledgement. He’d taken off the outer cloak at some point and looked strangely small without it billowing out around him.

“You wanna steal another one of my shirts or something?” D’avin asked eventually. It didn’t get any reaction. He hadn’t expected it to.

“Your shoulders are too stiff,” Alvis told him. He sounded tired. Looked tired too, come to think of it. There was something in the monk’s face that was less of his usual eerie lack of expressions and more like exhaustion.

After having to give death rights to eleven of what seemed to be his order’s founders, it was understandable.

D’avin rolled his shoulders quickly and then let them fall with a sigh. For lack of better ideas, he’d sat on the floor by the foot of his bed, closed his eyes, and tried to...meditate. Or something. Now it just seemed a little ridiculous.

“Yeah, well…” He leaned back against the bed with a grimace. “I’m a little out of practice.”

Alvis tilted his head to one side for a moment. Then he was sitting on the floor in the room before D’avin had even noticed him move.

“There’s a difference,” he said, “between clearing your mind and trying to stamp down every emotion without facing them first. You won’t be able to control anything efficiently if you’re spending half your energy trying to ignore your own conflicts.”

D’avin scoffed before he could stop himself. “You mean like you’re ignoring everything that happened down there?”

Alvis shook his head, and there was something like the start of a smile twitching the corners of his mouth. “I haven’t ignored anything,” he said. “I’ll grieve those Uncles, and I may be the only one who does until it’s safe to spread the word of them to Leith, but I know I’ve done my part. They’ll rest, as long overdue as it was.”

It didn’t seem like something that should be discussed so calmly, especially considering one of the monks hadn’t been dead on arrival. But hells, D’avin wasn’t exactly a therapist, so he wasn’t going to push the matter.

The silence wasn’t tense, exactly, but it was still strange, and D’avin knew Alvis wouldn’t be the one to break it.

“Alright,” D’avin relented, hands spreading in defeat, “fine. You wanna...impart your monkly wisdom on how not to make eyeballs explode? Go for it.”

Alvis did smile then, but it was one that didn’t entirely reach his eyes. “I’ll admit, my experience with this exact sort of situation is...minimal at best.”

“Yeah, you and me both, pal.”

That got a snort. Close to a laugh. Impressive. D’avin was reminded how infrequently Alvis seemed to blink when he was suddenly staring -- he really did stare a lot. It got to be unsettling after long enough.

“You were starting to find a balance,” Alvis said. “You stopped him attacking Dutch, and you calmed him enough to talk to us.”

D’avin pulled a face. “Barely.”

“Have to start somewhere. What got you that far?”

D’avin let himself hesitate before sighing. “What you mentioned,” he admitted, “the whole...sniper thing. Focusing on the shot. That helped.”

Alvis nodded, and his head tilted to one side again thoughtfully. “But you’re out of practice.”

“You could say that. Not like I had a ton of practice to begin with; I did that kind of work for half a year, tops.” D’avin shrugged. “There’s a reason I was in the infantry.”

“Low skill positions, huh?”

“Oh, ha ha.”

He remembered Dutch’s earlier comment in the caves, her, “alright boys, enough flirting,” and abruptly realized that she had only been half joking.

He also abruptly realized that none of them had been fully joking.

Well, there had been worse things.

“So.” D’avin sat up fully again, clapping his hands on his knees. “Old Town’s apparently crawling with sixes. No telling if Jelco’s happy juice works on them, and I’d like to have some plan to avoid any more exploding bits.”

Alvis considered him carefully -- which, admittedly, wasn’t much different than usual. “And you want my help with what, exactly?”

That was actually a decent question. It wasn’t something that came with a manual, and so far none of the attempts had given him a clear idea of how it was supposed to work. Alvis probably didn’t either. But hells, he would take anything at this point.

“You’re all about the…” D’avin gestured vaguely. “Y’know, the meditating and whatever. That’s supposed to help, right?”

There was a short silence. Long enough, though, that D’avin started to feel a little ridiculous again. Then Alvis nodded.

“It’s not like you can practice controlling a six without a six available,” he noted. “But focus...that we can work on.” He shifted, folding his legs beneath him and settling directly in front of D’avin. The guy really had very little concept of personal space. “Show me.”

D’avin frowned. “Show you what?””

“Your technique. Or possibly lack thereof. Try getting that focus back, whatever you were doing when you calmed the Uncle in the cave.”

That made it sound simple. D’avin supposed having someone staring at him, even that intensely, shouldn’t make it more difficult than the pressure of keeping an ancient monk from trying to kill them all. That knowledge didn’t help right now, though. He pulled in a breath and made himself close his eyes.

Now he really felt ridiculous.

“Am I supposed to ‘clear my mind’ or some shit?” he muttered. “Because that hasn’t really worked so far.”

“You’re not meant to be empty, you’re meant to be _focused_.” Alvis sounded closer, and it took some self control for D’avin to keep his eyes closed. “When you’ve got a six, it’ll be about finding their connection to the plasma and your connection to them through that. Right now…just pick something. Anything to focus on.”

D’avin let himself grimace before he relented. It had been a long time since he’d tried anything like this, and especially considering all of the crap falling to pieces around them at the moment, quiet concentration was hard to come by. It took a minute or so of sifting through ideas of what to actually focus on to realize that he was putting more energy into that than the actual task.

And this was just sitting in his room.

“Hard enough when there isn’t anything fighting back.” D’avin let his head fall back and scowled up at the ceiling. “It’s like I said, the plasma makes it this...weird buzzing. Tough to focus on anything trying to fight through a swarm of plasma bees, and things don’t quiet down even when there’s nothing going on.”

“And it’s like _I_ said, you’ve got this.” That got him to look down. He’d been right, at least; Alvis had leaned forward at some point, and his stare hadn’t lessened at all. Not surprising. “We manifest what we think, remember? Convincing yourself it won’t work isn’t going to get you any closer to figuring it out.”

D’avin didn’t entirely restrain a sigh, eyes lifting again briefly. “Well as long as I don’t start manifesting actual plasma bees…” That didn’t get much of a reaction. He shook his head and looked back at Alvis, trying to ignore how close he was and instead wondering just why he’d come down to this room in the first place. “What did you call me?” he asked. “In the caves, what did you tell Dutch?”

It was silent for longer than he expected, and D’avin was starting to wonder if he’d regret the question when Alvis actually blinked. That in itself was surprising.

“I called you the center of gravity,” he said, and somehow his voice was even quieter than usual. “And that hasn’t changed.”

“Okay,” D’avin muttered, “okay, sure. But what the hells does that _mean?_ ”

There was that almost-smile again. “It means you’re stable, Jaqobis,” Alvis said. “One of the only stable things in this whole damn system right now. Dutch is caught in the proverbial storm, and your brother wanders trying to find his own answers, but you...you planted yourself with your family and your ideals and haven’t moved. Now it means everything about this whole shitshow is culminating around you, because you’re a force and people recognize that. And it means everything that’s happened, the abilities you have now, weren’t just some cosmic accident. You’re meant to do this because you _can_ do this.”

Whatever he’d been expecting, it certainly hadn’t been that. D’avin realized he was staring and decided he didn’t really care, but he did manage the start of a scoff.

“You rehearse all that before you came in here?”

Alvis just tilted his head a little again, and then he leaned forward a few inches further. “Try again,” he said. “Snipers pull the trigger with the exhale, so just focus on breathing.”

“How do you even know that?”

“Focus. Meditation is about controlling yourself first.” D’avin didn’t even notice the movement until one of his hands was suddenly tugged free and pressed to Alvis’s chest. “Match my breaths. Pay attention to the movement of the air, nothing else.”

D’avin almost argued, but he forced himself to pause first. Breathing was simple enough. He could breathe.

He closed his eyes again and he breathed. He focused on the movement beneath his hand and slowed his own breath down to match the monk’s, focused on the way the air moved into his lungs and back out again, on the fact that he could just barely hear the air moving over the hum of the ship’s engines, and he focused on nothing else.

It was hard to tell exactly how long it lasted. Neither of them actually moved, and it was only Lucy’s voice that startled him out of it.

“ _Dutch would like you both on the bridge,_ ” she said, and D’avin blinked hard, instinctively pulling his hand back.

“Can do, Luce, thanks,” he called in the general direction of the ceiling, and then looked back to Alvis who, unsurprisingly, hadn’t stopped watching him. “I think it -- I mean it felt like it worked, there wasn’t exactly any green shit to move around, but…” There was no discernable reaction and D’avin managed a quick laugh. “Were my shoulders still too stiff?”

Alvis was silent for another few moments. He sat back and his eyes swept over D’avin once before he nodded. “They were, technically, but it’s not perfect meditation that will get the job done. The next time we run into a six, you’ll be ready for it.”

D’avin scoffed. “And if I’m not, I suppose Dutch’s creepy shiv will work too.”

“You’ll be ready for it.” Alvis stood, pushing himself to his feet with an almost unsettling ease. D’avin followed suit a good deal less gracefully. “And I’ll help, if I can.” He smiled. An actual, real-to-life smile that reached his eyes and suddenly gave D’avin a much better idea of why Dutched liked this guy. “Baby steps, right, Killjoy?”

It gave him a much better idea of why _he_ had somehow come to like this guy.

D’avin had always thought himself pretty good at picking up on signals, and even if Alvis seemed to be broadcasting them on an entirely separate channel, it seemed a pretty safe bet that they were there all the same. And maybe it was just the way the guy acted, maybe he really did do that kind of thing to everyone, but…

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

At least he knew for sure this one wasn’t full of that green shit.

D’avin moved forward before he could talk himself out of it, realizing that Alvis hadn’t even started to turn away, realizing that he actually leaned in like he’d been expecting it, _does he read minds now too?_

Alvis kissed like he spoke, with that same soft sort of urgency -- at least, it seemed, until they both realized the other wasn’t about to suddenly retreat. There was a pause, a very quick breath, and then Alvis pushed forward again, his grip on D’avin’s arm tightening, and D’avin remembered that this monk also happened to be a revolutionary leader.

It was easy, at least, to focus on this. There was no telling what they would run into in Old Town, or whether this would happen again even if they did survive, so D’avin let himself ignore everything else for the moment. He focused on the strings of beads pressing into his chest, the tight braids under one hand, the way that somehow, even now, Alvis seemed to be controlling his breathing perfectly, because _of course he was_.

D’avin had no idea how long that lasted either, only that Dutch’s voice over the intercom suddenly made everything else come forcibly crashing back and that he felt a tiny bit lightheaded when it did.

“ _It_ _doesn’t take that long to climb stairs, boys,_ ” she said. “ _Don’t make me come looking for you._ ”

Neither of them actually stepped away at first. The second they did, Alvis was back to his usual collected calm, and D’avin was attempting to find something to say that wouldn’t sound completely idiotic.

“I kinda...meant to say thank you,” he managed, and yeah, that was still a little idiotic. Could’ve been worse, though, he determined when Alvis flashed another quick smile.

“I got the gist. Come on.” He turned, absently tugging his shirt straight with one hand as he started into the hallway. “Let’s go save your idiot brother.”

D’avin took a second, pulling in a deep steadying breath and running a hand through his hair, forcibly shifting his attention back to the looming insanity ahead.

“Baby steps, Jaqobis” he muttered before he followed, sliding his door shut behind him. “Baby steps.”


End file.
